Accommodation, travel, and entertainment services are often reserved in advance of consumption of these services. However, providers of these services often lower prices to move unsold inventory prior to the reservation date. Sometimes, these providers allow customers to cancel their reservations without paying a fee or penalty. Customers would benefit from an automated rebooking service that monitored reservations, determined whether equivalent inventory was available for rebooking at a lower price, and offer customers the opportunity to cancel their existing reservations and rebook at this lower price.
However, technical problems have inhibited the development of such services. First, an automated rebooking service must know each user's current reservations. The service should be aware of these current reservations without the user having to describe them to the service (e.g., by filling out a form listing parameters describing the service). Second, an automated rebooking service must be able to compare each user's current reservations to available inventory items. These available inventory items may be obtained from different sources than the source of the original information. Therefore, even though the underlying inventory may be the same, it may be described differently. Thus automated rebooking service must be able to accommodate varying and inconsistent description of inventory across different sources of information. Additionally, websites of online booking agencies and service providers may be configured to identify and block requests from automated programs that run over the internet. Such blocking may limit the usefulness of an automated rebooking service.
Accordingly, a need exists for an automated rebooking service that can offer customers the opportunity to automatically rebook reservations while overcoming the technical problems that limit existing approaches.